The Physical Nature of Christian Life Neuroscience, Psychology, and the Church [Paperback]

This book explores the implications of recent insights in modern neuroscience for the church's view of spiritual formation.This book explores the implications of recent insights in modern neuroscience that attribute mental capacities often ascribed to a disembodied soul instead to the functions of the brain and body in collaboration with social experience. It explores how this insight changes the traditional care of souls, encouraging more attention to fostering spiritual growth through a social and communal focus.This book explores the implications of recent insights in modern neuroscience that attribute mental capacities often ascribed to a disembodied soul instead to the functions of the brain and body in collaboration with social experience. It explores how this insight changes the traditional care of souls, encouraging more attention to fostering spiritual growth through a social and communal focus.This book explores the implications of recent insights in modern neuroscience for the church's view of spiritual formation. Science suggests that functions of the brain and body in collaboration with social experience, rather than a disembodied soul, provide physical basis for the mental capacities, interpersonal relations, and religious experiences of human beings. The realization that human beings are wholly physical, but with unique mental, relational, and spiritual capacities, challenges traditional views of Christian life as defined by the care of souls, a view that leads to inwardness and individuality. Psychology and neuroscience suggest the importance of developmental openness, attachment, imitation, and stories as tools in spiritual formation. Accordingly, the idea that care of embodied persons should be fundamentally social and communal sets new priorities for encouraging spiritual growth and building congregations.1. Introduction; Part I. Human Nature as Physical: 2. Christian history and the two-part person; 3. Embodiment of soulishness; Part II. ThlӜ